Individuals are becoming increasingly dependent on electronic calendaring systems to keep up with their fast paced lives. This dependency has become more prominent in recent years with the advent of personal digital assistants (PDAs). In fact, the primary use of a PDA appears to be for purposes of staying in synch with one's calendar of events.
However, as society becomes increasingly mobile and dependent on electronic communications, calendaring systems have only marginally changed to accommodate trends and needs. For instance, a conventional calendaring system does not collaborate with different calendaring systems. As a result, an individual that needs to track and integrate with a variety of disparate calendaring systems is out of luck. But, individuals often have a variety of calendars that they maintain, such as work calendars, social calendars, religious calendars, association calendars, each of which may be associated with a different calendaring system.
Moreover, there is not just a need for one individual to integrate with his/her own calendaring systems, because in many circumstances there is a need to collaborate with calendaring systems of different individuals (e.g., husband with his wife or vice versa).
There have been some advancements in integrating electronic mail systems, but little attempt has been made to improve the integration of disparate calendaring systems. In fact, the trend has been to force individuals to use a generic calendaring system of the same type, if collaboration or integration is desired (e.g., a centralized World Wide Web (WWW) browser-based calendaring system). Yet with this technique, individuals are forced to adapt to yet another calendaring system, and this does not address the real issue of integrating disparate calendaring systems, which is often the practical reality that individuals are faced with today.
Thus, improved techniques for federating (collaborating and integrating) electronic calendaring systems into a composite calendaring system are needed.